Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:02 <inaudible> on anxiety and the gospel
Speaker 1 00:00:11 Today, we're going to be talking about automatic negative thoughts or in the counseling world. As we referred to them, as aunts, as we indulge in the subject, we are going to look at the metaphor of what the ants that you and I experience in regular life, how they actually mirror and teach us a lot about the automatic negative thoughts that we can have in our mind. And in our thinking patterns, because you see automatic negative thoughts, and we'll just refer to them as aunts from here on out, they have a way of being, and I don't know about you. We could probably sit here for a while and compare aunt's stories as to how these little creatures in real life has stealthily made it into our stories in one way or the other. And one of the things I think is important to see as we have looked at some of our thoughts and how they can get stuck in a rut, we talked about what that looks like to begin to curve new paths to walk on. And today we're going to look at how these ants can often times begin to trip us up, make an absolute obstacle for how we're trying to change and grow. And at the least provide a great distraction from being able to carve
Speaker 2 00:01:28 A new path in our thinking aunts
Speaker 1 00:01:33 Happen, because if we aren't thinking about our thoughts,
Speaker 2 00:01:37 That's automatic.
Speaker 1 00:01:39 If I'm not aware and consciously choosing what thoughts I'm going to think. That's when we see the odd automatic comes into being. And one of the things we know about things that we're not thinking about and intentionally infusing the gospel into is that the gospel is not something that in our sinful world and in the world of our flesh, that tends to take over and take precedent. So it is our opportunity that we are constantly and consistently taking the message of the gospel of redemption, of change, of hope and healing and peace. And we are infusing it into every aspect of the way that we live and think so when it comes to ants, we want to look at what the gospel has to say about
Speaker 2 00:02:28 Them. One
Speaker 1 00:02:31 Of the things I know is that you are probably familiar very much with the saying, oh, they have ants in their pants, right? They're very antsy, right answer, actually, something that's referred to a lot in our culture, but I want you to understand today that that is actually something that you can have ants in your brain. And just like when you have ants in your pants or ants in your cupboard or aunts in your house, these ants are on a mission for really just one thing. And that is to build their own kingdom. And it is a take whatever they need from you in order to make that happen. So I want to look at the structure of what it is the ants do to
Speaker 2 00:03:10 Kind of take over us and why
Speaker 1 00:03:13 Automatic negative thoughts are actually so dangerous
Speaker 2 00:03:17 For our processing, for
Speaker 1 00:03:19 Our thinking, for the ways that we are trying to grow. The first thing I want to look at is this ants steal automatic negative thoughts when we are letting them run loose when they are automated, right? When they are whoosh taking us on this negative pathway, they're consistently leading us to negative
Speaker 2 00:03:40 Pessimistic
Speaker 1 00:03:42 Places. They help us to regret the past. They help us to be very, very
Speaker 2 00:03:48 Past oriented or
Speaker 1 00:03:51 Very, very future oriented. I can't believe that happened. I really regret that. I don't know why that happened, or, oh my goodness. I'm so worried that this is going to happen and that isn't going to happen. And aunts, they take us in these directions of either the past or
Speaker 2 00:04:08 The future,
Speaker 1 00:04:10 But they do not allow us to be present
Speaker 2 00:04:14 In the now and steal and
Speaker 1 00:04:19 Steal our present moment. They breed Discontentment and they breed an ungrateful heart. That is just constantly looking at what we are missing, either from our past story or what we are anticipating missing from our future story to come,
Speaker 2 00:04:38 They breed pessimism,
Speaker 1 00:04:40 They steal the joy and the peace and the contentment of the now the next thing the ants do is that they kill. And so one of the things we have seen continually in our interactions with ants, I don't know about you, but one time I remember very, very, very clearly eating a hot dog as a child. And there was a red ant on it. And it was almost as if I put the hot dog in my mouth. I could process the animals on it, but I couldn't stop it in time to be able to decide, not to take that bite. That red fire ant in California blew my mouth up on fire. And for many, many, many minutes, which I don't even, it felt like hours. It absolutely caused me pain. It killed my taste buds. It killed my sense of being able to have fun. It completely distracted tripped me up and created an obstacle for me to be able to enjoy what was going on ants. We know that they will kill even each other to be able to gain strength and to be able to actually come out on top. They will kill anything that is necessary in order to gain that as a food source, to grow themselves, to take power away from something else so that they can be growing their
Speaker 2 00:05:49 Own kingdom.
Speaker 1 00:05:52 When I was in Ecuador, there was an aunt there called the bullet ant and the bullet ant at that time in their language, he called it the Tonga ant. And it was the most feared experience of my whole time in the Amazon rainforest. There was many different things that seem to be a giant threat, whether it was anacondas and piranhas in the water or Jaguars or other things that lived on the land. But the one thing that was discussed probably with greatest fear was this aunt. And so compared to Jaguar, the Saint was a little, but compared to other ants that you had probably met in your life, this aunt was actually pretty significantly sized. And this is something that caught us continually to be aware of, be aware of this aunt, because at a C to kill it only has self-interest and it will use you to get what it needs.
Speaker 1 00:06:38 And its bite actually caused so much great pain to the nervous system of an adult that it actually disoriented you and overwhelmed you for about a period of an hour to several hours with so much pain that you were incapacitated to be able to continue, honestly, to have a thought, to be able to move your body or to be able honestly, to pull yourself out of that pain. And so you see ants kill, not only do they still, they kill, they're only looking to take you over to grow their kingdom. And so many of us have experienced what that is like in our thoughts also because a negative thought is never satisfied by just owning one part of her story. One part of our thoughts, it continually seeks to take over more
Speaker 2 00:07:30 And more of our peace, more and more of our logic, more and more
Speaker 1 00:07:36 Of everything that it can use to grow its own kingdom of negativity and pessimism and darkness, honestly, being written into the way that our thoughts
Speaker 2 00:07:47 Are being thought. We see so clearly
Speaker 1 00:07:53 That when someone happens, these ants automatic negative thoughts that are Leafs, that they're breeding consequences into our lives. They begin to result in anxious feelings, rapid heart rate, honestly, even depression, and just the lack of feeling motivation for doing anything. And this is how we see that ants destroy. When I was little, we lived in California, we had the tiniest of cute little ants and continually overnight, or within a period of a short amount of time, you would open up the cupboard and you would see
Speaker 2 00:08:26 He there in the flower. Again, there's nothing,
Speaker 1 00:08:30 Not an ability really nor desire, honestly, to sift through the foul flower and see what you can save. It's destroyed at that point. When the answer introduced into that, they bring destruction to everything that they are trying into touch automated. Negative thoughts are very, very much the same because you see, see when our minds are constantly taking us on this negative journey and automatic thoughts come in and they bring our whole minds, which actually begins to bring our body, our body chemicals, our brain chemicals in this net negative path on this negative cycle. Will you begin to feel that? And after time, sometimes I have very short period of time. These ants, the destruction that they are bringing to our ability to cope our ability to come back from things, our ability to deal with what's going on, on in the world and our story around us, it begins to make us isolate,
Speaker 2 00:09:30 Feel disconnected because
Speaker 1 00:09:32 Every cell in our body is actually affected by this, this consistent process of these negative thoughts. Okay. It begins to create a toxic system in our brain chemicals and in what's going on in our body begins to follow our brain. And that's when we often times just begin to feel so done. Two main emotions that when we're constantly being absolutely honest slot by these ants that we begin to feel,
Speaker 2 00:10:03 And that is I don't care and I'm done. And
Speaker 1 00:10:10 If I can hear those words come from so many people that I work with, one variation or the other, something that is just,
Speaker 2 00:10:18 I don't even care or I'm done. That is the iteration that we see continually coming out.
Speaker 1 00:10:26 And I know that because of my own story, I have felt both of those things on many different occasions when these automatic negative thoughts tried to come in and own the ground and the work that is going on in my mind and in my heart. So it's oftentimes when we begin to assume, I'm fine that we begin to see that actually there's great deception because aunt's the concealer of themselves. They sneak in and they can oftentimes be looking like they're not a big deal when really behind the wall or behind the counter, or right outside our threshold, actually entire kingdom waiting to come in and join the other aunts that are there. And it's the same way in our minds once we begin to allow and we don't take it seriously when we recognize that the ants have come into our mind, they've come into our story.
Speaker 1 00:11:18 That they've come into the way that we're thinking, the misrepresented truth and the concealing and the deception. They all began to become a very familiar place in the way that we think. And the whole concept of deception is that we don't actually know that it's happening in our time in the future together. We're going to continue to talk about how do we develop feedback systems in our lives. You can know when that deception is happening, that we can invite friends. We can invite the holy spirit to be speaking that to us. But for today, I want to look at these qualities of ants and what do we see? We see that ants steal. We see that they kill and we see that they destroy. And when we look at those three words, we are taking very much back to the words of John 10, 10, when Jesus has told us that the thief comes to steal,
Speaker 2 00:12:12 Kill, and destroy. And that
Speaker 1 00:12:14 When we are experiencing great amounts of anxiety, when we are having a rapid heart rate, when we are out of breath, when it is going into panic, when we are living our lives, kind of on the threshold of the window of our tolerance, and we feel like we are just on and we cannot turn our minds off, and it is just buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. We begin to see that the schemes of the thief are
Speaker 2 00:12:40 Working in our story.
Speaker 1 00:12:43 And one of the ways he does that is using these ants, the automatic negative thoughts, John 8 44 tells us that Satan. He is the father of lies that that very same thief who is orchestrating the stealing and the killing and destroying. He is the father of lies. And that we also know that our own flesh is full of the seat, that in our very synapses and cognitions and our pathways that living in this sinful world and being exposed to hurt and different malfunctions of our very
Speaker 2 00:13:17 Bodies, that it
Speaker 1 00:13:19 Is a constant pursuit of overcoming to understand what the gospel has to say to these moments, but Jesus comes and he says that he is here to give us life abundant. And I think so many times we think that that might be that we get to drive a really nice car or that we get to have a very easy situation. But what he's actually saying is in the midst of all of everything in our story that is being stolen and killed and destroyed that he is offering something different. And indeed it is the opposite of that. And that though the circumstances in our story may or may not change, he is with us offering us something different. Okay. That's why I believe that even in the midst of anxiety, as we began to see that maybe I can't actually control or change my circumstances, that our response, that our hope is not actually that these will change, but it is that we will choose an abundant response to those circumstances that are outside of our control. So I want to talk a little bit about what is like to destroy
Speaker 2 00:14:29 The ants.
Speaker 1 00:14:32 First thing that we do when we're looking at destroying the ants is we want to begin to identify our trigger. Why, what is it that continually is getting me to think about? This was really tripping me up on the inside. I want to give you an example from a student that I was recently talking with and they were so to speak up in class because their trigger was that they are going to answer
Speaker 2 00:14:56 A question wrong in class.
Speaker 1 00:14:59 Why and what is the belief behind that? What is the automatic negative thought? The automatic negative thought was
Speaker 2 00:15:05 Cause I'm stupid.
Speaker 1 00:15:07 They're going to see me as stupid. So the trigger is answering a question wrong in class. Therefore the behavior at that point is I'm not going to answer a question. Or if I get called on to answer a question, I'll try to get out of it by making a joke and making everyone laugh so that I don't actually get into the circumstance where I'm going to get that, the question
Speaker 2 00:15:24 Wrong. So our trigger
Speaker 1 00:15:26 Is being called on in class that fear of answering a question wrong in class. And the automatic negative thought
Speaker 2 00:15:33 Is, oh, I'd be seen as stupid. What we
Speaker 1 00:15:38 Began to do is we identify the trigger, we identify the ant, and then we have the opportunity to kill the ant. And you see in real life, I'm actually kind of like, I'm not pro bug, but I actually have a very hard time killing things, whether it is that they're in my house or not. It's a big moral dilemma for me every time. But when it comes to these automatic negative thoughts, when it comes to these ants that are trying to live in our brain and take over more and more of the space in our brain to build their kingdom of destruction, I'm absolutely ready and supportive to kill any ant that tries to take that ground. And really the process of killing ants is actually what we call oftentimes re
Speaker 2 00:16:18 Framing.
Speaker 1 00:16:20 So to kill the ants, a lot of times it begins with us thinking, what is the opposite of the thought? If I'm going to look so stupid in class, because I answered the question wrong, what is the opposite of that? And the opposite of that thought, the reframing of that thought can probably be in several different ways. But for today, we're going to say that it is that some I could believe about the situation. Sometimes I'm going to make mistakes and I am going to do things that are not my best, but that does not mean that I am stupid. So I'm taking the truth of the matter. I'm not going to say to myself now I have to everything, right. And that is how I can avoid thinking that I am stupid.
Speaker 2 00:17:06 That's unreasonable. Sometimes I make mistakes and I do things that are not my best, but I am not stupid. So
Speaker 1 00:17:16 We identify the ant. We identified the trigger, we identify the aunt and we begin to kill the aunt. We be into reframe it. And we begin to anchor in to what it is to really believe the truth
Speaker 2 00:17:31 About this negative thoughts
Speaker 1 00:17:35 We've talked before about the gate-keeping versus truth is the beginning of our journey to understanding what it is that we can think about how we practice thinking the truth. That gets us to a point as Philippians four, eight, and says that will lead us to a place or the God of peace. We will see that he is with us. He will be with us. So really understanding the truth, reframing this ally, this ant into the truth, and then sinking into that, anchoring into that and not nudging from telling yourself that truth
Speaker 2 00:18:09 Over and over again is how we kill ants.
Speaker 1 00:18:15 Sometimes I have to write it out. I have to practice. I have to see it on paper. I'm a very visual learner. So for me, just to continually be thinking it and try and capture it and then reframing it is actually a very difficult thing. So I have created actually what I call my aunt workout. And we're going to link that in the show notes. And it's basically just a printout for you to be able to write out and begin to identify this process of identifying your trigger, identifying the ant, and then practicing, reframing for what that is. I think that reframing process is a beautiful time to invite friends and family into, to be able to ask, is this a true thought because when we're in deception, it's sometimes it is very hard to even get to the place where we can be confident that what we're reframing and anchoring into is actually full of the gospel and full of truth.
Speaker 2 00:19:07 We're
Speaker 1 00:19:07 Going to talk about in our time's coming up, how it is that we maybe intentionally surround ourselves with community to invite their feedback and what that looks like. But for today, my hope is that you will continue to pursue and gather other voices that you will identify what is happening in my story that is launching these automatic negative thoughts that you'll begin to see the destruction and the stealing and the Keela killing that is going on in your story, around you, from the presence of these ants, not being properly dealt with. And I hope that you will do everything that you can to look at the ants and begin to be ruthless with them and completely uninvite them to have a voice in what is going on. As you think about the things that are causing the things it inside of you. I hope that you will continually be seeing the power of the gospel to be able to come in and speak truth to these negative thoughts and that we would begin to see that the presence of Jesus
Speaker 2 00:20:14 Makes all
Speaker 1 00:20:16 Difference in offering us an abundant
Speaker 0 00:20:20 Opportunity, maybe to respond in the midst of whatever's going on around. So until next time, press on.
